


Two-Year-Old

by Variative



Category: Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 13:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9274820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Variative/pseuds/Variative
Summary: A’den has his fair share of problems all right, and he knows where to put the blame for those. But he also knows who to blame for having felt what it’s like to be on death row by age two, and it was never Orun Wa.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to write a meta about Jaing's various and severe issues, but I wrote this instead. Warnings for canon-typical abuse, violence, and trauma. Most of the content of this work comes from my own headcanons, given Jaing's chapter or so of total screen time in the books, but none of it contradicts canon to my knowledge, and much of it could be supported by canon if I had the time and energy to go through and pull quotes.
> 
> EDIT: Thinking about it, this might seem like I dislike Jaing, and I don't. He's one of my favorite characters. But I write Jaing a lot and I have to work really hard not to woobify him, and sometimes I have to just sit down and write something horrible, and that's what this is.

Jaing shot A’den in the thigh, a long time ago. It had been only a few days or maybe a week before they were condemned as defective, about two weeks before Kal saved them. The blaster had been almost as big as Jaing’s arm. The shot had seared through the flesh of A’den’s outer thigh, an easy fix with bacta but deep and so karking painful that A’den had nearly burst into tears.

A’den only has a faint mark there now, but he remembers it like it was only a day ago. There are a certain number of moments that A’den is aware of as points where death stepped particularly close to him: exploding transports, blaster bolts that would have taken his head if not for the thin protection of random chance, Jaing standing over him with that blaster. A’den is not and was not afraid of his vod, but he knows, he knew then, that if he had given into the childish urge to cry, Jaing would have shot him in the head next. Never mind that they had been children at the time, dangerous, unstable, terrified children, and crying would have been understandable behavior for any of them. Not to Jaing. A’den remembers the look of disgust on Jaing’s soft little face, an expression somewhere between desperation and curiosity. No one else seemed to have noticed, but the Kaminoan assessor had hurried forward to separate them, keeping her electric prod more firmly turned to Jaing than A’den. When A’den was pulled from bacta half-healed he learned that in a week, after a final round of assessments and data collection, they were to be terminated. Mereel and Ordo had gripped each other’s hands tight, and Prudii and Kom'rk had clung to them like nervous shadows. Jaing had sat apart, face angry and distant. A’den had known then. It had been Jaing’s fault. None of the others had seen what had happened.

A’den will never be able to bring himself to hate the Kaminiise as much as the others, because he knows what the others don’t: that Jaing had pulled a trigger on A’den with the full intention of harming or killing him. What about that doesn’t speak to disturbed, uncommandable, deviant, defective? A’den has his fair share of problems all right, and he knows where to put the blame for those. But he also knows who to blame for being on death row by age two, and it was never Orun We. Not completely.

Jaing thinks A’den is irritating and pathetic, and worst of all useless. A'den isn’t close to Kal like Ordo, or entertaining and clever like Mereel and Prudii, or all of that as well as loyal, like poor, used Kom’rk. He just is. Among the elite of the elite, A’den is average at best. He even forgave Jaing for wounding him. They’ve never spoken of it. 

They don’t speak of the scars on Kom’rk’s face, either, or the fact that it had taken all four of them to pull Jaing off Kom’rk when they were six years old and Kom’rk tried to wake Jaing during a nightmare. It isn’t a case of  _ cin vhetin _ or any other kind of forgiveness so much as nobody wanting to poke too hard at Jaing’s open wounds. Jaing hadn’t known what he was doing when he attacked Kom’rk. Probably.

They don’t talk about it. Not then, not now, not ever.

A’den thinks he knows what Jaing’s problem is, what his nightmares are about. A’den thinks that what Ko Sai did to Jaing messed him up so badly that he’d buried that whole person inside his own head to get away from the trauma. And when Jaing has those nightmares, the ones that leave him huddled in the fetal position, sobbing and lashing out at any touch, that’s the kid he locked away, hammering to get out. 

A’den has wondered before if maybe that day when Jaing nearly killed A’den, he was already trying to cut that child out of himself—the kid who was scared, and in pain, and who cried and was weak when someone he trusted hurt him. A’den wonders often what would happen if Jaing let the kid out. Maybe he would be able to love his brothers back like they all want him to but know he never will. Or maybe Jaing would just be reduced to that crying mess of a child again, paralyzed with old fear and pain stuck pacing the same track and wearing the same holes in a two-year-old soldier’s brain.

A’den really pities Jaing, sometimes.


End file.
